


Hanahaki

by taylor_tut



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Friendship, Gay Keith (Voltron), Hanahaki Disease, Heavy Angst, Hunk (Voltron) is a Good Friend, Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith/Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) Whump, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pining Lance (Voltron), Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 00:25:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12900048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: I CAN'T THINK OF A TITLE OKAYKeith and Lane break up. However, the lingering feelings they have for one another have painful consequences.





	Hanahaki

have fun! This will be a two part story.

* * *

 

Keith sat down quietly at the table with a very meager bowl of food, not looking up or greeting anyone. 

The rest of the paladins, minus Lance, were already seated, each working on their own breakfasts and chatting, when he finally spoke.

“Just so everyone knows, Lance and I broke up,” he informed. The room fell silent. 

“Wha--? Keith, really?” Hunk floundered, clearly a bit surprised that he wasn’t the first to know. “Are you okay?”

Keith patted himself down as if to take physical inventory. 

“Yeah,” he replied, “yeah, I think so.” His chest hurt a bit.. 

“Who initiated it?”

“Pidge,” Shiro chastised immediately. “You don’t have to talk about it,” he reassured. “That’s none of our business.” But from his tone, it was clear that he was curious. 

“Uh, no, it’s okay,” Keith replied. “You’re all probably going to find out eventually, anyway. It was mutual,” he said, the thing that people said when it wasn’t at all mutual. “We just decided it was best that we... didn’t date anymore.”

Hunk looked almost like he could cry, but he instead put a hand on Keith’s shoulder and patted. “If you need to talk, we’re all here,” he promised. 

Lance staggered out from his bedroom, looking terrible and exhausted. It was to be expected--they’d both had a long night.

“Um,” Keith greeted articulately, “hey, Lance. How’d you sleep?”

Lance frowned. “You already told them,” he assumed. 

“We’re so sorry,” Hunk rushed. “we’re here if you need anything.” Lance coughed into his sleeve, but smiled awkwardly.

“I’d really just rather not talk about it,” he admitted, and Shiro nodded. 

“It’s time for training, anyway,” he announced, assuming that the distraction would be good for both of them. 

Turns out, the distraction was good--for Keith. He was focused, motivated, and able to take his anger out on the bots; everything that Lance wasn’t. 

“Lance; take a strike,” Shiro urged. He’d been dodging, and poorly, for half an hour. Now, he was breathing heavily and sweating, looking pale and unhappy. 

“I’m done with this for the day,” he informed, retracting his bayard. 

“Oh, come on,” Keith urged, “don’t be a baby. I’m training.” 

“Well,” Lance wheezed, “we’re not all  _you_.” His armor echoed in the training room as he stormed off toward his room.

* * *

 

Training had long since ended when Pidge found Keith still in the training room. He was battling a bot, at a level much higher than any of the other paladins were accustomed to facing, even Shiro. 

“Keith,” she called, but when she broke his focus, the bot took the advantage and kicked him hard in the side. “End simulation!” she yelled, rushing to Keith’s side as he tried to scramble back to his feet to keep fighting. “Keith, what are you doing? That level is way too high.” 

His breathing was heavy, but since he’d just been kicked in the ribs, that wasn’t too much of a red flag. The cough, however, was slightly more concerning, especially when Keith covered his mouth closely with his hand and gagged. 

Pidge panicked, rubbing his back while stepping away until it looked safe that he wasn’t going to be sick. For all his body’s efforts, there was one blue flower petal in his hand when she pried it away from his face.

Her expression dropped. “You need to tell him,” she advised, her tone no-nonsense. 

“I can’t,” Keith said. His voice was raw and sad. 

“So you’re, what, just going to suffer? This is serious.” 

Keith’s friendship with Lance was only just on the mend. It had taken several weeks for them to be able to be in the same room without being able to cut the tension with a dull, rusty spoon, and even more than that to be able to speak in clipped, short sentences. 

“I can handle it,” he promised. Maybe he couldn’t, but he would.

* * *

 

“Hey, Lance! Be my taste-tester,” Hunk requested, stirring a bowl of spicy-smelling food.

The thought of eating was nauseating enough to make him pale.

“Oh, no thanks, buddy,” he denied, “I’m not really hungry. I had a big lunch.”

That was more believable when he was dating Keith, when they’d often sneak off to have meals in private.

“I know you haven’t eaten today,” Hunk said seriously. “Please, just have a bite.” 

Lance gulped, steeling himself. Ever since the breakup, he hadn’t had much of an appetite.

“Sure,” he smiled, “anything for you, pal.” Hunk held out a spoon for Lance, and he clamped his lips around it, closing his eyes tightly. 

“It tastes like something my mom would make.” His stomach groaned loudly. “I forgot I've got--something,” Lance said, excusing himself from the room. Hunk followed him out of the kitchen and to the showers.

“Lance!” he cried, kneeling down beside him. “Hey, breathe through it.” Lance dry-heaved a few times unproductively. 

When he finally looked up, there were tears in his eyes from exertion, but his smile never faltered. “Sorry about that,” he chuckled, “I guess I’ve just been feeling a little sick lately.”

“No, I’m sorry I pushed you into eating if you weren’t feeling well,” he apologized. “I’m going to get you a water pouch. Be right back.” 

As soon as Hunk left, Lance turned on the cold water.

* * *

 

“Keith,” Pidge soothed, rubbing small circles into his back, “you can’t keep doing this. You need to tell him.” 

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sighed. “No,” he reassured emptily, “it’s fine. It’ll pass.” 

He just had to get Lance to fall back in love with him. That was all. He’d done it once, after all, right? 

So when Lance  skipped dinner, Keith took a plate of food to his room. Taking a deep breath to calm his nerves, he knocked three times, waiting for so long that he sort of didn’t expect for Lance to answer at all.

The door swooshed open. “Keith?” Lance asked, rubbing his eyes sleepily--he’d clearly been roused from a nap. Keith didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. “Uh, can I--do you need something?”

Oh God. He was panicking.

“Um, hello; space to Keith?” Lance tried again, waving a hand in front of Keith’s face. “Are you going to say something, or...?”

“Right, I, er--I noticed you weren’t at dinner.”

Lance blinked. “Very astute of you, considering there are only seven of us.” 

“I thought you might be hungry. So I brought you dinner.”

Whatever Keith had expected was not how Lance reacted. Instead of taking the plate, or thanking him, or even just smiling his bright smile, Lance shoved the meal away with a grimace.

“If I were hungry, I’d have been at dinner,” he snapped, “so you can leave now.”

“What? H-hey,” Keith stuttered, but Lance slammed the door in his face before he could argue. 

“Goodbye,” Lance called through the closed door, leaving Keith standing in the hallway with a rapidly cooling meal and a sinking feeling in his chest.

Once alone, Lance bent over his trash can, gagging painfully. He spat out bloodied leaves.

* * *

 

“Come to think of it,” Shiro thought out loud, “I haven’t seen much of Lance lately at all.” He turned to Hunk. “Have you talked to him recently?”

“Not a lot,” Hunk admitted. “He’s been pretty solitary since... recently.” 

Keith huffed. “It’s okay, Hunk; you can say ‘breakup.’ That’s what we did. We broke up.” 

Hunk winced at Keith’s tone. While Lance had become more withdrawn, barely eating and asking to opt out of training more often than not, Keith had gotten irritable. He was snappish, sometimes even flat out mean. Usually he apologized afterwards, but even that trend had been growing less frequent, being replaced by crossing his arms and moping. 

“I know,” he said quietly, “I’m just trying to be sensitive.”

“Well, I don’t need you to be sensitive,” Keith growled, “I’m fine. And Lance shouldn’t be getting special treatment, either. If I’m able to train, why isn’t he?”

“Everyone processes the same things differently,” Shiro scolded. “I’m not giving him preferential treatment. You two just... need different things.”

Keith’s eyes prickled with tears. “Yeah, we figured that out,” he snapped, “I’ve gotta go.” 

“Keith, come on; I didn’t mean--!” 

But Keith had already pushed through the doors and wasn’t looking back. He pressed a hand over his mouth, feeling the creeping, painful sensation of roots in his esophagus, and gagged it back. He wasn’t going to make it to his room in time. 

Instead, he collapsed in the hallway, back pressed against the wall, and breathed as slowly as he could, spitting thin, watery saliva and tiny purple flower petals between his legs. The tears had spilled over, both from pain and the reason behind it. 

He wanted to be with Lance. He  _needed,_  physically needed to be with Lance. And Lance didn’t want him. Every time he tried to spend time with him, every effort he made to bridge things back together, Lance pulled a little further away. Hell, he hadn’t even seen him in a week. Allura promised that Lance was still training, just not with the group, and that he was actually doing quite well on both the bots and with his Lion. 

Lance was clearly doing so well without him, and here Keith was, spitting up fucking roses in the hallway and crying. Lance was supposed to be the emotional one, the needy one, the clingy one; so why was he so okay now?

Maybe Keith just wasn’t good enough for Lance to miss.

“Keith?” a voice asked tentatively. Shit, shit. He hadn’t even heard the footsteps in the hallway.

“Yeah,” he replied as casually as he could, cleaning up his face with his sleeve, “yeah, sorry; I was just... I dropped a contact.”

“You don’t wear contacts.” 

Lance. Lance was standing in front of him.

“So what’s really going on?”


End file.
